Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong (Cornell University Press, 2021) by Alexander B. Downes, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and Co-Director of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, is now available for hardcover and e-book purchase.
Watch the Catastrophic Success book launch event.
About the Book
In Catastrophic Success, Alexander B. Downes compiles all instances of regime change around the world over the past two centuries. Drawing on this impressive data set, Downes shows that regime change increases the likelihood of civil war and violent leader removal in target states and fails to reduce the probability of conflict between intervening states and their targets. As Downes demonstrates, when a state confronts an obstinate or dangerous adversary, the lure of toppling its government and establishing a friendly administration is strong. The historical record, however, indicates that foreign-imposed regime change is not, in the long term, cheap, easy, or consistently successful.
The strategic impulse to forcibly oust antagonistic or noncompliant regimes overlooks two key facts. First, the act of overthrowing a foreign government sometimes causes its military to disintegrate, sending thousands of armed men into the countryside where they often wage an insurgency against the intervener. Second, externally imposed leaders face a domestic audience in addition to an external one, and the two typically want different things. These divergent preferences place imposed leaders in a quandary: taking actions that please one invariably alienates the other. Regime change thus drives a wedge between external patrons and their domestic protégés or between protégés and their people.
Catastrophic Success provides sober counsel for leaders and diplomats. Regime change may appear an expeditious solution, but states are usually better off relying on other tools of influence, such as diplomacy. Regime change, Downes urges, should be reserved for exceptional cases. Interveners must recognize that, absent a rare set of promising preconditions, re gime change often instigates a new period of uncertainty and conflict that impedes their interests from being realized.
